Bio-Sensing

Modern day practice for identification of common bacteria involves (mostly blood) sample preprocess, culturing, Gram typing, and the identification of type and strain of the bacterium. The entire process takes one plus day to one week to complete, involves the use of several pieces of instruments and is labor intensive. Therefore the need for a fast and low cost method is obvious and pressing. Working with the academia and health professionals in Pakistan and in the US, we are working to develop the protocol for addressing this need using a nano-engineered platform/assay.

The nano-engineered hybrid plasmonic platform (HPP) consists of quasi-periodic array of gold pyramids of ~ 200nm with the financial help from US Aid, we are working on the identification T.B bacteria in rural communities of Pakistan. We are developing a new technology which will be used for the fast identification of various bacteria including multiple drug resistance T.B. Interestingly; we have observed some good signatures of T.B bacteria using Raman spectroscopy

Our efforts in this direction are resulted in the production of more 100 research publications in last 3 years and couple of research grants.